A Lithuanian bellmaker and the Mongolian scout who enslaved him race to stop the deployment of a clockwork doomsday device.

Two hundred years ago, astronomers and geomancers collaborated to create a new technology, a way to draw down the energy of auspicious stars to regenerate the slowly depleting power of the land where they had lived for thousands of years.  But the bureaucrats overseeing the process realized that the device could also be used as a weapon, to the benefit of the Son of Heaven, the emperor of China, and the inventors concealed the device rather than allow that to happen.

Discovery of the plans sparks a race to find the device—to stop it—or to set its dreadful power free.  The quest will unite, and divide, six people who see the device as the solution to their own problems:  a dancer whose grace hides deadly skills; the last warrior monk of a ruined temple; an astronomer’s daughter forced to submit her mind to her beauty; a Jewish student lost without his community; a Mongolian scout desperate to remove the name of “traitor”; and a Lithuanian bell-maker who believes that casting weapons for the enemy might win him his freedom and let him go home.

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Prequel Novella, The Grail Maiden, now available!

Characters you thought you knew, history you never imagined!

1307, Carlisle, England Young Allyson is the first to hear of the death of King Edward II during a battle with the Scots—but cannot reveal her knowledge lest she be exposed as a witch. When the man she loves, a Templar, returns from France with news of the disbanding of his order and the arrest of its leaders, she realizes that the heir to England might well betray the Templars to his own advantage. She must turn for aid to the one man she dare not trust: her own husband.

Each of them holds a secret that will change the lives of the others as they work to prevent the war with Scotland from becoming the ruin of them all.